


Post-drift Post-mortem

by glassfrog



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Car Sex, Face-Fucking, Hate Sex, M/M, kind of, not really - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-14
Updated: 2021-01-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 11:41:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28670148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glassfrog/pseuds/glassfrog
Summary: One year after their disastrous first meeting, Newt attempts to establish dominance over Hermann in the front seat of his car.
Relationships: Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb
Comments: 4
Kudos: 20





	Post-drift Post-mortem

Three years after finding his calling as an inquisitor of kaiju biology and dedicating himself full-time to that pursuit, Newt was dismayed to discover that much of his work had not been well-received, and that he was thought of by the world of science as slightly mad. It was 2018 at the zenith of the PPDC’s success, when Jaeger pilots were celebrities with fluorescent white smiles, who appeared on Saturday night talk shows and were paid plentifully by fashion brands and fitness companies to shill their products in flashy social media posts. The mid-September conference at the Shatterdome in Los Angeles was a flesh market of viable, talented scientists ripe for recruitment. Newt was attending with four men and three women he knew from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all of whom had completed the twenty-four week training course at the Jaeger Academy previously. The university had funded the visit.

Newt had not spoken to Dr Hermann Gottlieb in fourteen months, but recognised him easily from the smell of mothballs and the several inches of stuffy air that he carried about him. He had seen him wandering about over the weekend, always on his own. He knew Hermann had seen him lingering in his peripheral vision, glaring at him and flicking rolled up bits of paper at his head during lectures on the discernable history of kaiju and the scientific phenomenon of the drift. He resented that Hermann was ignoring him, so made no attempt to speak to him in turn. By the third and final day he was demoralised and pissed off.

He had planned for the conference to mark the beginning of his glorious ascent to becoming the foremost authority in kaiju biology, but he had been ridiculed and vacated from the stage by a couple of security guards after somebody realised he wasn’t supposed to be there. The scheduled lectures, by comparison, were close-minded and dreary. He fell asleep during the last one and was jostled awake as the other attendees milled out into the main reception. 

Hermann was trying feebly to make small talk with several decorated older scientists: Ling Zhang who pioneered the change from nuclear power to digital technology for the Mark-4 Jaegers, a dismal-looking man Newt recognised as the founder of a famous program he never bothered to explore, and Chrysanthemum James, who worked under Caitlin Lightcap during her early explorations of the Drift. They were giving him the brush-off. Newt moved closer to his own group, who had formed a protective barrier of crisp-suited shoulders as they chatted in a circle. He hovered around the perimeter trying to find a sufficient opening, failed, and shuffled off towards the half-empty buffet table where he feigned a deep interest in pouring himself a glass of water.

As more scientists spilled out of the conference hall, they began to split into groups of pre-established and newly acquired friends. This was a familiar ritual that followed most scientific conferences. Scientists, not poets, were the modern bohemians, and nowhere else on Earth would they find brilliant, like-minded individuals such as here. Pursuit of knowledge was the primary reason for their attendance; second was the pursuit of sex. Newt had pursued it himself at other conferences and experienced no obstacles.

He picked at a plate of cheesy chip crumbs and watched the crowd thin out. He had travelled from the hotel in the back seat of another MIT scientist’s car and did not feel like a ten mile walk through Los Angeles. Hermann was talking at a militaristic member of the PPDC who had spoken on the second day, and unlike around half of the people left in the lobby Newt could see he had not done so with a view to sex, as the PPDC member was a woman. A work colleague perhaps. Newt knew Hermann had carried out work for the corps on commission in the past, building the code upon which the earliest Jaegers were based. Yet he had failed to ingratiate himself to anyone and did not seem bothered by the fact, so long as he was respected.

“Don’t you think the use of the drift raises ethical questions?” said one of the MIT doctors. “We have no idea what the long-term effects could be.”

“I don’t care how they do it, so long as they wipe out those monsters,” another one replied.

“Wipe them out!” said Newt, outraged. “Are you crazy? You don’t think we can keep killing these things? Hundun breached in early 2014, it was 1,700 tons, ginormous. Then seven months later along comes Scissure with two sets of fangs and a wingspan half a mile wide. Onibaba and Ragnarok in 2016 both weighed about 2,000 tons. And just when we thought they couldn’t get any bigger, Yamarashi, Ragnarok’s bad-ass daddy, blew all our minds last year. They’re getting stronger. It’s like they’re being designed. If we don’t find out exactly what these things are, where they came from, why they’re here, we’ll never take them down.”

The four men and three women from MIT went outside. Newt tagged along. They all got into a taxi and left him on the pavement like a weak animal rejected by the rest of the pack. He sat on a cold wall in the car park close to the Shatterdome and felt annoyed. It was 6PM and already dark out, but the starless sky was tinted a dirty orange colour and the street away from the car park was alight with pizza and hamburger joints, fashion outlets, a 24-hour laundromat, an out-of-place book shop and neon advertisements for perfume and underground anti-kaiju bunkers. Ten minutes passed. Stragglers wandered past him and got into their cars, or went into fast food restaurants. A small, ugly, beetle-shaped car with protruding headlamps and windows that wound up instead of down flashed at him from a few parking spaces away. This was followed by the clack of a cane on pavement and Hermann walked past him, swaying slightly, swamped in a raincoat down to his knees.

“Looking for a good time, gorgeous?” Newt said maliciously.

Hermann spun around. “Were you following me?”

“I’m just getting some air.”

“Don’t play coy, Newton. You’ve plainly been abandoned.”

“I didn’t want to go with them anyway.”

“Where are you staying?”

“The Emerald.”

“I’m at Imperial. The Emerald is on the way. Hop in, I’ll give you a lift.”

Newt cast a skeptical eye at Hermann’s battered car - a Citroen 2CV. “You’re sure that hunk-a-junk goes?”

“If you’d rather walk, be my guest.”

Newt got into the passenger seat. Hermann reversed into a lamp post and drove off. Newt clung to his seat as Hermann, poised grimly over his steering wheel like a praying mantis, weaved in and out of traffic. Eventually they pulled onto the motorway where Hermann went into the slowest-moving lane, his foot pressed all the way down on the accelerator as his old, beige-coloured car rattled along stubbornly at sixty-miles-per-hour. Newt observed him. He was a badly put-together jigsaw of a man, an amalgamation of clashing features, square jaw, prominent cheekbones, frog-like mouth, dowager’s hump and the kind of eyelashes most women had to purchase in a box. The last time they met - which, incidentally, was the first time they met - he had a crop of wild, wavy hair cut around his ears in a 70s style. Now it was cut short and uneven, as if he had tried to shave it himself and made a bad job of it.

“You’ve aged,” Newt said.

“You’ve put on weight.”

“You drive like my alcoholic grandma.”

“At least I know how to drive.”

“I know how to drive.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“I ride a bicycle.”

Hermann scoffed and Newt felt annoyed by the gesture, because he valued his own importance objectively above Hermann’s in the grand scheme of things and thought he was in no position to be scoffed at by him.

“Poor Hermann,” he said.

“Why do you say ‘poor Hermann’?”

“You never get any fun. No friends,” Newt said. “No sex.”

“How do you know I never get any sex?”

“Oh come on! D’you really think every scientist who stuck around until today was just desperate to learn all about - what was it? Let me break it down for you. The last day? It’s a formality. It’s - it’s like foreplay. You know what they say, Hermann. Work hard, play hard.”

“Don’t be vulgar,” Hermann said. His voice was loud due to the effort of the subject, which Newt thought was fitting for him. He wondered if he had slept with both men and women before deciding which he preferred. He imagined Hermann, like a Victorian, would have been scandalised by any suggestion of sexual attraction no matter the gender. Maybe he had not had sex with anyone. Maybe, Newt thought with relish as the idea dawned on him, Newt would be his first.

“You should try it,” he said. “You’re so uptight. It’d do you good. Raucous sex three times a day for a week, prescribed by yours truly. Then once daily for a month and once a week for the rest of the year.”

“It’s laughable that you think you can shock me after all this time.”

“Trust me, I’m a doctor.”

“If that’s how you feel, why don’t you take part? Though I suppose the body can’t miss what it has never known,” said Hermann drily.

“Yeah, it can. It’s biological. _You_ know what I’m talking about,” Newt shot back. “Of course you do.”

“You’re beginning to sound desperate.”

Newt unbuttoned the front of his jeans and allowed his dick to strain against the front of his gaudy underwear. He stroked it in a lazy way until it turned hard, poked the tip over the elastic waistband and let a thin, clear rivulet spill over his fingers to form a dark, wet patch on the fabric.

“Put that filthy thing away. If you make a mess in my car I won’t forgive you,” Hermann said.

“It’s not filthy. I’m clean, see? I scrubbed myself top to bottom and soaked myself in sweet posy perfume just for you.”

“Please. You’ve done nothing to endear yourself to me or anyone else all weekend. Don’t tell me you truthfully believed you might _get lucky_ tonight? You’re pathetic.”

Hermann’s dick was raised, hard, against the crotch of his brown tweed trousers. Newt wriggled in his seat and pushed his underwear halfway down underneath his jeans, and allowed his erection to stand proudly, unaffected by the chill that permeated the night air.

 _Enjoying the show?_ he thought, _wait ‘til you see me from the back._

“You’re a disgrace,” Hermann said, colour high on his ears and blade-like cheekbones. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“You like it.”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Pull over.”

“Why in God’s name should I?”

“Don’t you want to see what happens?”

Hermann’s inner turmoil reflected on his face in a frown and the awkward movements of his jaw, jutting from one side to the other as if Newt’s come-on had set his teeth on edge. He looked like he suspected he was being made fun of, which he was, Newt supposed, in a way, though he had every intention of following through with his seduction. Visibly seizing a temporary burst of courage, Hermann swerved into a lay-by behind a row of heavy goods vehicles with front windows covered by large aluminium sheets. He parked, pulled on the hand brake and sat silently, wondering if he had been tricked. Newt let him wonder. 

Then he reached over, opened Hermann’s fly and smirked as his erection sprung against the fabric of his white briefs. “You’re so hard.” He took it out deftly with one hand. It was hot and heavy and bigger than he anticipated, with a drop of clear liquid beading at the tip. “Let me get that for you.”

He dipped his head and engulfed Hermann’s dick with his mouth. Hermann sucked in a breath and held it. Newt revelled in the throb of his dick, thick and hot and heavy on his tongue, and the way his veins on the back of his hands pulsed as he clenched them in his lap. He began to run his fingers through Newt’s hair, slowly at first, then urgently as Newt bobbed his head up and down on his cock, dragging his tongue up the shaft and swirling it around the tip.

“Like that?” Newt asked, messy and overeager. “I bet you do.” His head was pushed down and Hermann’s dick struck the thick muscle in the back of his throat. Tears springing to his eyes, Newt took control of his pulsing tongue and with some effort opened himself up completely, bringing his lips to the base of his cock and staying there, nose half-buried in dark pubic hair. He did not attempt to pull away even as the last of the oxygen left his lungs and his throat began to convulse with the urge to break free and gulp down huge mouthfuls of air. Eventually Hermann’s hand disappeared from the back of his head and he withdrew and looked him insolently in the eyes, with thick strands of saliva dripping down his chin. “S’good?”

He was propelled back down unceremoniously, so that Hermann’s dick caught on the inside of his cheek and grazed against the wisdom teeth that had grown only part-way and at a jagged angle when he was eighteen. “Easy!” Newt cried, though his mouth was obstructed so it came out more like ‘ _eashy’._

Hermann’s hand on his head was gentle, belying its strength. His free hand snaked under his chin and stroked down his neck, feeling the swell of his cock through his throat, pressing and rubbing it. Newt broke free with a gasp and scrambled into a kneeling position, causing the tiny car to rock alarmingly. Straight away, Hermann slipped a hand down the back of his jeans and jabbed two fingers against his asshole. He yelped around a mouthful of cock. Hermann’s fingers were broad and dry.

“Don’t you have any lube?”

Without a word, Hermann popped open the glove box and took out a small pot of petroleum jelly. He coated two fingers and started to finger Newt clumsily under his clothes. Newt fought to keep his lips sealed around his cock and was aided by the fingers curling in his hair, using it as a means to work his head up and down. Newt’s own erection, still encased within the confines of his underwear, throbbed as his throat was fucked with abandon. Every now and then Hermann would pull him off and he would gasp wetly, spit smeared across his face and his eyes and nose streaming.

Sitting down without need for his cane, Hermann was surprisingly agile, and surprisingly strong. He hauled Newt onto his lap. He started to unbutton his shirt and fly as if he was preparing him for a night of lovemaking, and it did not occur to Newt that he should have informed him that it was not usual to be naked during a hook-up in a grimy lay-by off a Los Angeles highway. But Hermann showed no trace of desire to remove his own clothing, except his raincoat, which he had taken off earlier. He stripped Newt of his shirt and tie, took off one of his boots and pushed his pants down to his ankles. He manhandled Newt onto his lap as if he was a ragdoll, slamming his hands into the dashboard, spreading his cheeks apart and aligning his dick with his hole.

The delayed realisation that Hermann was going to penetrate him, and that the fingering had not been a singular sexual act but rather a precursor to a more intense form of intercourse, caused panic to flare in Newt’s brain. “I’m not ready!” he gasped, but Hermann was already inside him. A stab of pain. Newt muffled a shriek and laughed instead in the same wounded way, as if in continuation of it. “Just couldn’t wait for it, huh?”

His thighs shook as he lowered himself, pushing aside the agony of the intrusion that had come too soon, with little preparation and an inadequate coating of petroleum jelly smeared on Hermann’s dick. The pain, his nakedness and Hermann’s serious, almost transactional demeanour formed in Newt the feeling of being used sexually, accentuated by Hermann’s hands squeezing bruises on his chest, his ass and the plump part of his belly just underneath his navel. He was frantic, as if he was trying to touch all of Newt all at once. It turned Newt on. He began to stroke himself frantically with both hands; Hermann seized his wrists and yanked them away. He brought him down as he braced his feet against the carpeted car floor and angled his hips up so that the head of his dick hit the curve deep in Newt’s insides and rubbed punishingly against it.

“That hurts!” The words spilled out before Newt had pause to consider them. Hot with embarrassment, he tried desperately to deny them by wriggling like a worm on Hermann’s dick, trying pointlessly to take in the spare inch that wouldn’t fit.

“You like it,” Hermann hissed.

The mirror image of himself in the car’s windscreen confirmed the assertion. Newt’s whole body burned; he felt humiliated and aroused because of it. His nose was running into his mouth.

It did not occur to him until months later that his experiment had succeeded beyond his wildest hopes, and he had learned more about Hermann by opening his legs for him than he had by opening his mind. His brief stint at the Jaeger Academy in Alaska nearly three years earlier had been intense and rewarding and officially a resounding failure as he had been unable to drift with anybody. Nor, he was told, should he ever hope to. Some pilots with steadfast characters and a strong sense of empathy were able to drift with multiple partners, and even fresh recruits, still green around the ears, were usually able to maintain a somewhat shaky bond with a reliable friend, a sister or a brother. But Newt was among those whose personalities were deemed too difficult, too emotionally unpredictable, too arrogant and too distrustful to ever be properly considered. At twenty-six and brimming with an inextinguishable talent for pig-headednness, Newt was heartened by this - he knew Hermann’s own course, taken one year earlier, had ended in the same way. After three years of correspondence he had been gifted with Hermann’s deepest confidences, which were usually reserved for the pages of a dog-eared journal. The wilder parts of his exceptional brain, suppressed by his family, flourished in the flames fanned by Newt’s own mad genius. To Newt, the fact that they had both been dismissed as lost causes was affirmation that, once united, their shared understanding would overcome the very laws of nature.

He proposed the drift as if proposing marriage, only to find the inside of Hermann’s head was an impenetrable steel wall. Subconsciously or not his mind had taken pains to put up barriers for Newt. Their thoughts swirled around each other, slipping like silk and never quite connecting like they were supposed to. Hermann must have sensed similar resistance in him. They watched as the number on the digital counter in front of them struggled from fifty to thirty, then plummeted to zero. Newt had torn the Pons from his head. Hermann took his off very slowly, placed it aside and said ‘well, that’s that’.

Deliriously, Newt wondered if this was what Hermann had tried to conceal from him fourteen months ago, and marvelled at the absurdity of it. He had been thrown away so callously, he thought, as their correspondence had carried on in a prickly way for several months and finished without conclusion, with a ‘yours sincerely’ at the bottom of a neatly folded piece of printed paper devoid of tea stains or ink splotches. It hadn’t ended properly so it was as if it hadn’t ended at all. Newt was set adrift without a single word of anger or disgust for an anchor, and for what? All to hide the uncomplicated, boring compulsion to bury his dick in his ass and fuck him stupid. The simplicity of it brought back the hurt he had buried in years of bitterness and resentment and long, sleepless nights spent poring maniacally over kaiju entrails, blood samples, dung, and projects relating to them.

“Feels good, huh?” he gasped as Hermann’s hands on his buttocks urged him up and down. “You wanna f-fuck me so - so bad.” His voice strained with the effort of talking through his punished throat. 

Hermann took hold of one of his ankles and pushed his leg up until the muscles on the back of his knee shrieked, spreading him obscenely wide. With his other hand he seized Newt’s chin and held him in place, staring at him with a steel mask that betrayed nothing as he pulled his dick halfway out of him and fucked him shallowly. Newt tried desperately to meet his gaze, but as Hermann thrust into him and - slowly, deliberately - rubbed the end of his dick hard against the back of his insides, his eyelids fluttered and his eyes rolled back in his head. Hermann withdrew and repeated the motion, teasing Newt’s desperately clenching opening with small thrusts then sliding deep inside. Newt moaned and sobbed. He drooled all over Hermann’s hand. His own hands were clinging to the dashboard and the inside of the door.

It was dark inside the car. On the other side of the window, a street lamp flickered. The light caught and glistened on the sheet of sweat that had formed on Hermann’s forehead. A short distance away strangers sped past in trucks and cars and on the leather seats of motorbikes, oblivious to what was going on between them.

For one moment Newt felt as if he might be about to wet himself; the next he was sure was going to. The thought of losing control of his bladder in front of Hermann was unbearable. With one leg hooked over Hermann’s shoulder and both hands braced behind him, he could only wail in protest of the feeling, and even that came out wrong, in undulating waves that peaked with every thrust.

“Are you going to…?” Hermann breathed. “Just from this?”

“No!” Newt said, and came anyway, crying and shaking.

Hermann pulled out of him and pushed him onto his knees in the dark, cramped footwell before the passenger seat. Newt needed no encouragement to open his mouth and stick out his tongue, but strong fingers pinched his nose as Hermann stroked himself to completion in front of him. He came thickly in Newt’s mouth, then put his hand over his face and held it there.

“Swallow,” he ordered. “I don’t want you making a mess everywhere.”

Newt was breathing hard. He managed to swallow half of it before his efforts were interrupted by another great gasp, causing two sticky ribbons of come to erupt out of his nose and splatter onto the back of Hermann’s hand.

“For God’s sake,” Hermann muttered, snatching his hand away and wiping it on a handkerchief. He hauled Newt out of the footwell, pulled his pants up for him and deposited him in the passenger seat like a rag. He switched on the car engine and pulled back onto the road.

Newt sat with the orange glow of the passing street lights flashing across his lap, burning with embarrassment. He could not summon even the faintest feeling of satisfaction that he had tempted Hermann so easily, so thoroughly had he disgraced himself. Anything he had taken from Hermann during their intercourse Hermann had taken from him in turn. There was nothing more they could offer each other now. The festering carcass of their relationship had been dissected. Newt knew they would not speak again. Even if they both ended up working for the PPDC, the science department was vast, and with Hermann a mathematician and he a biologist he could foresee no future where they would find themselves reunited. When they passed in corridors, eyes would be averted and they would pretend not to know each other.

It was what he wanted - to have Hermann and be done with him. Just to prove that he could. But as Hermann crunched his car to a halt outside The Emerald Hotel with its lichen-encrusted walls bathed in green spotlights, he felt, once again, discarded. In his usual, reckless, Newt-like way he had blundered head-first into a maze of crazy ideas and emerged at the other side, emotionally bruised.

Hermann did not speak to him as he turned off the car’s engine and the sickly green light filtered in. Rage flared in Newt’s chest as he was struck with the realisation that, again, Hermann was depriving him of a proper ending. He turned on him, incensed, ready to start shouting. What right did he have to dig up their remains without incinerating them afterwards? Hermann’s face was dark and hollow. Somehow he looked older than he had just an hour before. It was the same mask-like expression he wore following their failed drift, though something was different now and the angry words (which Newt wanted to sound grandiose but knew would come out too fast and not enough) died on his tongue. Hermann, looking steadfast and desolate like a Renaissance painting, was not devoid of emotion, and perhaps he never had been. He was simply, desperately sad.

Newt got out of the car. The cold air was full of miniscule drops of moisture that blew into his face. “I’ll, uh, see you around,” he said. His throat was sore and the salty taste of come lingered on his tongue. His underwear was damp with his own semen. It was only as he began to walk towards the wooden archway covered in plastic ivy leaves that framed the front of the hotel that he decided that he could not face living a single moment more in limbo, and if Hermann was not going to give him a conclusion then he would take one. A confession, a rejection, he didn't care. He would throw himself on the ground in front of the wheels of his car and dare him to drive if he had to.

“Hermann,” he said, turning around. But Hermann was already rattling away, turning too fast out of the parking lot and nearly crashing into two parked cars. Newt thought about running after him, but the surge of adrenaline had faded as quickly as it had appeared and he knew it would be pointless to try. Plus, he was hurting. He went into the lobby of the hotel, which was as green and its exterior, and picked up a fresh towel on the way to his room as he was in dire need of a shower.

The following day he would throw himself into his application to the PPDC’s biology department, which was the natural next step in his ambition to become the world’s leading kaiju expert. Sterile studies of months-old specimens could never match the abundant pleasure of digging elbow-deep through the still-warm guts of a vanquished monster, though Newt’s colleagues at the MIT had little appreciation for such things. They required him really, the PPDC, as certainly no other scientist could equal him in determination and ferocity. He would be fulfilling his humanitarian duty by lending his skills.

Newt’s thighs were still trembling as he reached his room, took off his clothes and threw them on the floor.

 _Forget Hermann,_ he thought. He probably wouldn’t see him again anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this story for the NSFW Newmann zine which can be found at www.gumroad.com/nsfwnewmannzine. It's a pretty hefty document with writing and art from all sorts of people, put together in a real labour of love. Have a gander!
> 
> Thanks for reading, and I really hope you enjoyed it.


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